--I haven't develop any iPhone Web Application ever...so i am little bit confuse about that.
--I want to build a Web Application for iPhone which will be made using(CSS+JavaScript).
--I read some where that no approval is required for iPhone Web Application.
is it correct ?
--And if i have made my iPhone Web Application (using CSS+JavaScript)and uploaded at my server.
--and if i want to open it in UIWebView using iPhone SDK simply...
--is this Application is valid for iPhone Web Application portal https://adcweb.apple.com/iphone/index.php or not ?
--how can end users get the Application on their iPhone after submiting to the portal...
--can any one explain me the whole process of iPhone Web Application deployment and distribution process ?
Thanks in advance...
iPhone (and others) have support for "stand alone" web apps. These are web apps that are designed to work offline. These applications are hosted on the web, but along with the application is a manifest file that describes all of the resources that the application will need. These resources are all downloaded to the device.
On the iPhone, to "install" one of these applications, you need to simply bookmark it. When you bookmark the app, the phone asks if you want an icon for it in the standard app area, vs just a bookmark in the browser.
Once bookmarked, the user can simply tap on the icon like any other application. This will launch safari for your application, and it starts using its local resource. There's no reason a standalone application that never touches the internet can't be written. The Safari Reference Library has a lot of information on this.
If you'r building a web application, we talk about something, that does not need to be installed on the iPhone, because it runs inside the browser. So yes, you don't have to go through the approval process, it's just a website optimized for the iPhone. The submission you linked to in your question is to get listed at apple with your web application (I'm not sure about the guidelines for that), it,s not a submission for the app store. You don't have to (and you should not) make use of the SDK by using UIWebView, because that would mean to build an native application which needs approval, has to be installed etc. If your goal is or can reached by building a web application, all the user needs is safari.
You do not need approval for a web application. The iPhone can view any web page through its browser (as long as there's no flash), so just implement your application as you normally would, but design for the smaller screen. The submission form is just for listing in portals (I don't know which portals).
If you want to make a native iPhone application that talks to the server, then you need to sign up for a developer account and develop the application in Objective-C (with the help of UIWebViews, which are essentially embedded browser windows). That will require approval.
What about a web application that needs to be installed. By that I mean an application that consists of a web page (with embedded CSS and Javascript) that uses HTML5's localStorage to work offline. You still need to be able to access the page itself if you lost the connection, i.e. the page needs to be stored locally, because once you are offline, you can't access it from a server outside...
Related
We are trying to develop a hybrid app that can update itself by using css/javascript/html from the internet, instead of storing them in the phonegap project.
Like so
Html5 cache manifest in a UIWebView?
HTML5 AppCache in UIWebView
It now does work fine on iOS 5 and 5.1
In fact, inside phonegap index.html we do or location.href redirect to the web site. The web site has offline manifest, which allows the phonegap app to start and work the second time in an offline mode (after all resources were cached the first time). And changes to manifest do update the app correctly. I have tried terminating the app in the phone, and restarting it while the web site is down - it still works.
There are solutions that allow self update - for example the phonegap-based Worklight. So silent self-update doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.
So the question is, did anybody submit similar an app to appstore? There's potentially no code at all in the app, all it does is goes to the web site.
Apple appears to allow apps to download data updates and Javascript/HTML for use in UIWebViews. They even presented a WWDC session on data driven apps a couple years back.
But note this item in Apple's app review guidelines:
2.12 Apps that are ... simply web sites bundled as apps ... may be rejected.
The only way to know for sure if your app is acceptable is to submit it to Apple for review, as "similar" apps do not appear to set any precedent for any future approvals.
I'm building a simple web app for iOS that will not be published to the AppStore.
For infrastructure limits (and my boss!) , I can't use xCode anyway to build the app in a native way.
The only NATIVE functionality required by the web app should be a simple "Add to contacts".
I've tried to implement it with phonegap , but it works only compiled under xCode.
Is there any way to "add to contacts" without building an app (using only a web-app )?
Thanks in advance
Andrea
I don't think there's a way for you to add a contact directly, using only a web app.
PhoneGap was made for this sort of thing, allowing you to access a device's features (like Contacts, Camera, GPS, etc). But if your company's project specifications don't allow for an app... I don't know that there's a way to do this directly, via the web.
If you're building a web app... while you may be targeting iPhones, you're still making it available to anyone with a browser. I'm not 100% on this, but having some way for a web page to directly manipulate a (Mac) user's contacts seems like a security issue.
As a test, I tried placing a vCard on a page, and accessing it via my iPhone. Changing the extension from .vcf to .vcard didn't yield anything (and for some weird reason it prompted me to open the file via Dropbox).
What did work was emailing myself the vcard as an attachment. I was able to view the attachment, which then gave me the option to add the info as a new contact.
I'm writing a web application using Dashcode. Is it possible to access the iPhone address book from within this web application?
Dashcode is just the development environment IDE for generating widgets and iPhone apps and actually write the apps using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Any app you make will need to sit on a server and be accessed through the mobile browser on the iPhone. So the question is can you/i connect from a web app to the iPhone native applications. Just from a security point of view i would doubt that this is possible or even desirable,
However i have seen suggestions that a native application in x-code could be built that would have a web interface that would be able to talk to the browser but i am not sure how you would engineer that or if it would work.
I suspect a simple solution is to sync your iPh=one contact with Gmail, or similar web app and then access it or write your own server that you sync contacts to. However this is not a general solution i suspect.
Hope this helps even though it is not the answer.
I am building a hosted mobile application so I can write once and deploy to many mobile platforms. My plan is to write a native application with a single screen that is a browser that navigates to my hosted application. Of course this is so our application is in the App Store, Android Market, etc.
Is it possible to use the PhoneGap JavaScript so my hosted applications can use local APIs? For example, I would like to be able to upload pictures taken from the camera.
Short answer: no.
More information: PhoneGap: It's possible to use only the phonegap.js and it's functions only in a Website (doesn't want an App only a Webpage)?
Short answer
No. You need to add pctures upload logic in each framework
In addition to what has been answer it will also depend on your application store offering. If you're intending to offer the app in the iPhone App Store, these kind of apps aren't permitted. In the guidelines it states that apps that basically launch a browser or UIWebView will be rejected.
Additionally, you could always create the app as a "home screen" app, that runs without the chrome, etc on the iPhone. Hope this helps.
I have read some post about apps programming for Iphone and Android, but I have one question. Is it posible when there is a mobile website optimized for mobile phones, that I can create apps for Iphone, Android, Win 7 and Blackberry, that only statrts the browser as instance and display the mobile website? What do you think, is this ok? Do you have any ideas or examples for that kind of apps? I mean this is not an app, that should be has access to the hardware of the phone, only web app.
Thanks
Nik
This would work.
You could create an app that consists merely of a webview into which you load your content. The content could be loaded over the mobile network or be stored locally.
However most users (including yours truly) strongly dislike apps that merely present a single website to the user, because of the long delays if the content is loaded over the mobile network every time and because the UI is, in many cases, very different to what the he or she is used to from native apps.
Most users fail to see the need for a specialized app just to visit a website which they could as well keep as a favorite in their mobile browser. On the iPhone, you may even add favorite websites as icons on your homescreen, so there is no need for apps presenting a single website at all.
It's not only possible, such things are already done. One example I know of is cookd, a restaurant guide for Vienna. But there are some constraints; for example, cookd requires GPS data for the "Nearby" option; on my Android phone (HTC Legend), this is possible when I open the web page directly in the browser (the browser asks if I want to allow cookd.com to get this info); but the same webpage, running in an application that does nothing more than display the browser component, cannot do that. To fix that, they would have to build GPS reception into the app and forward this info to the browser component.
O'reilly has a fantastic article about this:
http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
This is a little bit directed to iPhone only, but will give you a good overview about the topic and possibilities.